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Character Issues

Television dramas in our post-“Sopranos” age have become supersize, but are the actors now too small? Glenn Close of the FX series “Damages” won the best-actress Emmy award last month. But Jon Hamm, the dashing lead actor of AMC’s “Mad Men” and a favorite to win, lost. Maybe it’s not surprising: a veteran like Close can readily shoulder the demands of her role, where Hamm, the greener actor, may have to mature into his.

TV roles have not always been so taxing. Television acting has long been dismissed as merely hitting marks and reading cue cards. But the arrival of “The Sopranos” in 1999 changed all that. Television fans had been waiting for something like this for a long time. Finally, we had our very own aesthetic paradigm shift. It was like the publication of “Ulysses” or the installation of that urinal in the art show. In a single bound, TV became cinema — understated, baroque, potent, adult.

Only longer. Much longer. Vincent Canby of The New York Times defined this emerging genre of TV-as-the-new-cinema as the “megamovie.” Over the eight years that “The Sopranos” ran, it became clear that this 80-hour-plus masterpiece may have required more patience and effort from the lead characters than drama ever had, from Euripides to Artaud to Stoppard. It made bruising demands most notably of its bearlike lead actor, James Gandolfini, who was responsible for ensuring the show’s continuity and coherence even as everything perpetually changed around him: directors, writers, cast, crew.

Today, nearly a decade after “The Sopranos” began, megamovies are what virtually all producers of hourlong TV shows strive to make: nervy, cinematic dramas with inventive soundtracks and ferocious, high-status central characters. “Mad Men” and “Damages” are just such megamovies. “In Treatment,” “Rescue Me” and “The Shield” also fit the bill. “Mad Men” and “Damages” are even created by “Sopranos” alumni (Matthew Weiner of “Mad Men” and Todd Kessler of “Damages”) who learned their trade from the “Sopranos” mastermind, David Chase.

In the Chase paradigm, a show’s main character must be fundamentally evil, and this evil must undermine the tenacious American fantasy that there are morally responsible roads to power and moreover that the achievement of power is itself a moral responsibility. Chase once told me in an interview that conventional dramas reassure audiences that “authority figures” — doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists — “have our best interests at heart.” In “The Sopranos,” authority figures hate us. This kind of cynicism is now the industry standard. “Damages,” which is about a devious litigator, suggests that avenging career women are no less savage than mob bosses. “Mad Men,” about hard-drinking, womanizing ad executives, adds charming creative types to the blacklist. The lawyer of “Damages” and the adman of “Mad Men” are sinister, ugly figures. They’re not easy roles, and certainly not easy roles to play on a television shooting schedule, for hours and hours of screen time.

Chase situated the corrupt center of his “Sopranos” world in Gandolfini — a once-handsome actor with a menacing frame and porcine eyes who confessed many times in interviews that he felt rotten after playing violent scenes. What did that matter to Chase? He designed sicker and sicker scenes of violence for Gandolfini; he shot the actor to look increasingly hideous. Gandolfini got fat. He publicly despaired at the depravity of the character. But Chase never stopped riding him, and something in their twisted relationship produced the performance that defined the show, gave it unity and coherence and made it art.

Can the lead actors today duplicate Gandolfini’s accomplishment? On television shows, much more than on movie sets, lead actors determine the working atmosphere. They work grueling medical-resident hours — often 14 hours on, and with 12 off, according to union rules — and are on camera seemingly nonstop. Most dramatic leads, faltering under the pressure, rely on a caricature or revert to being versions of their actual selves. Gandolfini never did, always returning to Tony, a figure he loathed, again and again, as to true north, over eight years.

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Credit
Kevin Van Aelst

Glenn Close can do this. I spoke to her last summer before “Damages,” in which she plays a ruthless and murderous trial lawyer named Patty Hewes, had its premiere. As a longtime film and stage actress, she was wary of taking on a series, she said, because she would have to play Hewes longer than she had ever played a movie or stage part. As the plots, cast and crew came and went, she would have to find and seize hold of the merciless Hewes character. The first season of “Damages” proved she could do it. Like Gandolfini, she’s never resting. If she’s not entirely in control of a scene — if it’s someone else’s turn, say — she’s still Hewes, brooding, mollifying, strategizing, concealing wretched grief.

It’s Jon Hamm I worry about. The star of “Mad Men,” Hamm is a swoon-inducing, physically graceful actor — a through-and-through Hollywood person, without much training in New York’s Method-derived acting styles. As he remembered it in a panel discussion in January, the first scene he shot of “Mad Men,” in which he plays the evasive and cruel Don Draper, required a flurry of stage business. Cigarettes had to be lighted, rooms had to be crossed, shirts had to be changed, ties tied. Hamm says he struggled with this manual ballet, but anyone who saw the first season of “Mad Men” can testify that he made it look natural. And not only natural but also intensely expressive: Hamm in the first “Mad Men” season made midcentury pantomine both nervous and beautiful, elegant actions that sublimated Draper’s anarchic energies.

But this season, the Draper character is losing his touch, and the part doesn’t require so much dexterity. Draper loses control of his car and his reputation; he shows less Rat Pack finesse. The camera seems mad at Draper, and it gives him long, stung looks, during which he has almost nothing to do but be. Sometimes these are cutaways from when another character is dressing him down, flattering him or exposing him. Sometimes they are close-ups on moments of self-doubt. But Hamm, the actor, does not seem to like the silence, and he has a hard time staying steady as Don in the quiet interludes.

At these times, an incongruous vulnerability presents itself in the reptilian Draper. Accidentally, Hamm seems to flash on an exaggerated look of melancholy or distance — as if the actor were thinking, I don’t want to be this man. Perhaps Hamm, like many Hollywood stars, wants to be liked above all, and Draper is written as less likable in nearly every episode. If the show is to mature and last, Hamm will have to risk being hated.

During the first season, Hamm told an interviewer: “You’re kind of getting your hair slicked back and looking sharp and kind of button yourself into those suits. You combine that with how detailed and letter-perfect our set is, and it’s really, kind of, a lot of the work is done for you.”

Now this may be modesty from a debonair actor who wants to defuse intimidation and spread the credit. But a megamovie is not a sitcom, or even a multipart Tony Kushner play. Playing the lead in a “Sopranos”-like series is extremely rigorous work. If ever there were an occasion for frank thespianism, this is it. The lead must be consistent, subtle, physically strong and willing to defer to the often-capricious auteurs that run these things. Is Hamm up to it? “Mad Men” is my favorite show on television, and I’m hoping so.

MEGATELEVISION: I can only push ‘‘Mad Men’’ so hard, but please know it’s on iTunes as well as DVD. ‘‘Damages’’ is another great, freaky show. It’s back on FX in 2009. In the meantime, polish off the first season, which pits Glenn Close against Ted Danson, on DVD. At Amazon. Others worth giving whole fall weekends to: “In Treatment,” starring Gabriel Byrne; ‘‘The Shield,’’ starring Michael Chiklis; and ‘‘Rescue Me,’’ starring Denis Leary. What do you need with films in theaters — or as I call them, minimovies?

WHY DON’T YOU JUST TRY ACTING?: ‘‘Sanford
Meisner on Acting,’’ written by Meisner and Dennis Longwell, may not make you James Gandolfini, but it might move you closer. Better than reading Sun Tzu and trying to be Tony Soprano. Gandolfini says acting is ‘‘making a fool of yourself.’’ If he’s willing to do it, you might try it, too.

YOUR FAVORITE CURSE WORD: James Lipton plays superciliousness better than any actor on television. The miracle of ‘‘Inside the Actors Studio’’ is that his silly, puffed-up style generates fascinating effects in his scene partners — the actors he sits down with. He’s like Charlie Rose that way. Don’t dismiss him. Instead, check out hefty clips from ‘‘Inside the Actors Studio’’ at bravotv.com.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Character Issues. Today's Paper|Subscribe